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Primary Education

Wi-Fi as Reliable as the Lights in Your Classroom

The classroom of tomorrow promises an amazing education. Blended learning, flipped classrooms, digital curriculum and other modern learning models can better engage students and help educators be more effective. But they also create new challenges for schools and their overtaxed IT teams.

Instead of lesson plans depending solely on skilled teachers, they depend on consistent, reliable connectivity to school networks for access to educational resources.

It's enough to make school and IT leaders feel like they're a grade or two behind. Ruckus can help. We power the connected modern classroom with grade-A Wi-Fi and edge switching performance coupled with simple, market-leading secure onboarding and policy management.

White Paper: Future Ready Networks for Education Technology

Broadband and Network Capacity

According to the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), the top priority for Primary Education IT Administrators is Broadband and Network Capacity. IT Administrators are challenged by more devices coming onto the network and new applications that stretch the limits of aging infrastructure.

A wireless and wired network that scales to handle the device growth and meet the demands of the digital learning environment is the cornerstone of solid learning foundation. Choose a network that grows with your districts’ needs and budget constraints. With Ruckus, you can provide the highest device density per AP, wired network scaling capabilities, flexible management infrastructure and easiest device onboarding available.

Student Data Privacy

As of June 2016, 49 of 50 US States had draft legislation or enacted laws around the need to protect student data. Primary education IT administrators and superintendents are under enormous pressure to ensure that student data is protected and used in accordance with applicable local, state and federal laws.

By examining your network and sensitive repositories to see where student data lives, you can begin to take the necessary steps to protect it. Ruckus primary education solutions can provide secure device authentication, user policy definitions and encrypted communication to Student Information Systems that live on-premises or in the cloud.

Digital Learning Transition

According to the 2016 CoSN IT Leadership Survey, 90% of K-12 IT administrators expect their curricula to be at least 50% Digital in the next 3 years. With this transition to a collaborative, blended learning environment, the network is no longer a nice to have, but depended on to be always available and elevate the classroom experience for teachers and their students.

Automated, Self-Service Wi-Fi Onboarding

In years past, K-12 students entered computer labs and then exited, leaving the tools behind. Today, students walk in with devices and leave with those same devices to use at night. Decades of computer-centric thinking are giving way to connectivity-centric thinking – leading to a BYOD phenomenon that allows students to have access to educational tools around the clock.

Wi-Fi in education is about more than just accessing the network. Whether adopting a BYOD approach or an IT-based one-to-one initiative, the transformation to an unmanaged set of network users presents a new challenge to provide safe, predictable connectivity. However, the ultimate goal of improving students’ educational experience must not be compromised.

Secure onboarding solutions allow K-12 institutions to extend wireless access to a broad spectrum of users, devices and use cases without a phone call or a trip to the support desk. This happens by providing automated, self-service onboarding for a wide array of devices and determining the appropriate policy for each user and device.

There are many benefits of deploying secure onboarding in K-12, including:

Eliminate the inconvenience and security risks of captive portal logins.

Automate the device onboarding for all permitted users, including students, staff, contractors and visitors.

Ensure users get securely connected, not just configured.

Automate the enforcement of policies and access controls, including AUP, authentication and network privileges.

Provide ‘gold standard’ WPA-Enterprise encryption without needing to be a certified security expert

Track information related to users, devices and application policies for all wired and wireless connections.

Ruckus offers a leading solution to realize all of the above benefits of secure onboarding. With Cloudpath ES you can leverage your existing Wired or Wi-Fi infrastructure to ensure that users are easily provisioned and connected to your secure network across a wide range of laptops, phones and tablets. Learn more about Cloudpath.

Certificates for Chromebooks

Chromebooks are beloved in schools for being simple and secure. With Cloudpath ES, you can deploy the gold standard in security and certificates to Chromebooks in an automated manner.

Whether issuing from an existing Microsoft CA or through the built-in PKI, Cloudpath ES ensures every device receives the appropriate certificate without IT overhead. Once installed, the certificate is available for a wide array of uses, including certificate-based Wi-Fi, web authentication, and more.

For managed Chromebooks, Cloudpath ES deploys both user and device certificates, which are TPM-backed (burned into hardware for maximum protection). For unmanaged Chromebooks, Cloudpath ES provides self-service, automated installation of the certificate along with related services, such as WPA2-Enterprise WiFi using EAP-TLS.

Meeting the Broadband & Network Capacity Challenge in Education

On Demand

Keeping up with the escalating number of devices and bandwidth hungry applications on your network is the biggest challenge K-12 IT administrators face.

And as the BYOD phenomenon continues to grow, and school districts start providing Chromebooks to their students, making sure there is enough broadband to go around is increasingly important. Learn some leading best practices on how to handle this growth with wired and wireless solutions built for scale.

Meeting the Student Data Privacy Challenge

On Demand

49 of 50 US States have legislation in effect or in draft around the need to protect student data privacy. K-12 IT administrators are under enormous pressure to ensure that student data is protected and used in accordance with applicable laws.

But with BYOD, guest access, and everything going to cloud, how do you keep students' private data secure? Watch this webinar to learn how to effectively protect student data across your network.

Webinar: Meeting the Digital Learning Transition Challenge

On Demand

A continuous wired and wireless network is no longer a nice to have, but a requirement when transitioning to a collaborative, digital learning environment.

So how can you provide network availability to support always on digital learning initiatives? Hear from Bryant Wong, Chief Technology Officer of Summit Public Schools, explain his journey to provide a 100% digital learning environment in his school district.

Facing significant challenges in providing reliable, high performance Wi-Fi to 7 campuses and with very limited IT resources, Minooka School District needed to upgrade their legacy network.

Tune in to hear Aaron Souza, Director of IT at Minooka School District, walk through their Wi-Fi challenges of his district and why he chose to deploy Ruckus Cloud Wi-Fi. How did Ruckus solve those challenges? What improvements have they seen on their network?

Webinar: Secure Device Onboarding for School Networks

On Demand

With Cloudpath, you can eliminate help desk tickets related to Wi-Fi password problems, gain better visibility and control over clients on your network, and solve the encryption inspection dilemma. What are you waiting for?

BeamFlex Adaptive Antenna Technology

Performance Optimization

What it means:

Smart, compact adaptive antenna systems containing multiple elements that electrically manipulate antenna properties so as to create optimal antenna patterns for each device with which they communicate.

Why you should care:

Traditional wireless antennas are either “omnidirectional” (radiating signals in all directions) or “directional” (radiating signals in one direction). Ruckus BeamFlex Adaptive Antenna Technology takes a more adaptable approach. BeamFlex technology enables the antenna system within a Ruckus AP to continually sense and optimize for its environment.

This antenna system mitigates radio interference, noise and network performance issues, and improves application flows. The results:

Increased performance and range

Crystal clear video and voice communications

Maximized power efficiency

BeamFlex+ is an enhancement to Ruckus BeamFlex adaptive antenna technology by providing adaptive support to mobile devices. BeamFlex+ enables antennas to adapt to client device orientation in addition to client device location.

Why you should care:

With billions of wireless devices and new ones hitting the market all the time, it can feel like the Wild West out there. Cloudpath lets you onboard both IT-owned and BYOD devices in a fast, automated way. Cloudpath invented self-service Wi-Fi onboarding in 2006, and onboards millions of devices each year. It uses standards-based security, strong encryption, and flexible policy controls to extend enterprise-grade security to every device coming onto your network.